D-M-E goes east with new China subsidiary

In an effort to meet expanding Asian markets, tooling technology supplier D-M-E Co. has opened its first China subsidiary, a logistics centre called D-M-E Trading (Shenzhen) Company Limited.

Located in Shenzhen, a city in the Guangdong province of China’s Pearl River Delta, the facility will offer distribution, quality assurance and warehousing logistics for Asian molders, moldmakers and mold designers, Dave Lawrence, president of the Madison Heights, Mich.-based company, said. “The centre will enable us to bring products to our customers in Asia much more competitively priced than shipping them out of Hong Kong or other parts of the world,” Lawrence continued. “This way, we avoid some of the taxes that the People’s Republic of China places on imports.”

Lawrence stressed that D-M-E’s new facility, which employs approximately 25 workers in a 1,900-sq. ft. space, is a wholly foreign-owned enterprise (WFOE) rather than a partnership. “The decision to establish our own company in China, rather than partnering like most U.S. manufacturers, provides us with exclusivity and control,” he explained. “The biggest challenge in that respect was meeting the large number of requirements that accompany opening a WFOE in that part of the world, but we believed that doing the enterprise as a subsidiary was the best way.”

Nor was the centre’s location chosen lightly. “We gave that a lot of thought,” Lawrence said. “There is a lot of plastics processing going on in the Pearl River Delta, and Shenzhen, in particular, is very active in the moldmaking arena.”